Yup. Just like Sony have been rumored to go with 8 gig of Ram as well to counter Microsoft. Thou personally I can't even remember the last time I played offline but the always lingering potential of the your connection going down is not something that would be very helpful if the always online thing is true. If the 3rd party devs are the ones pushing for the no used games policy (which has been talked of for long time), could it be that only games by certain publishers will have such a function?

Sony is going with 4 gigs of DDR5 ram, not 8 gigs. There is no source that states that Sony is going with 8, and they'd be insane to, because their 4 gigs is much faster than Microsofts 8 (and oodles more expensive). What Sony did was move from 2 gigs to 4, which causes them to surpass Microsofts ram capabilities.

Microsoft had 8 gigs of DDR3 , with 3 gigs reserved for the OS. Sony has 4 gigs of DDR5 with .5 reserved for the OS. What the articles are talking about is that originally it was 1.5 gigs DDR5 vs. 5 gigs of DDR3, which is actually a close comparison that Microsoft ultimately wins due to the sheer size of ram difference. Sony got feedback that 1.5 wasn't enough to remain competitive, so they upped it to the 3.5, which crushes Microsofts 5 any day of the week.

The situation really is not all that comparable and Sony would be insane to go up to 8 gigs of DDR5 because it would majorly inflate the cost of the system, even if they get a great deal on ram. They are more powerful at the moment anyways, 8 really offers no benefit.

Microsoft and Sony are going to get targeting different markets this gen I think, with Sony going for power and Microsoft going for services like Xbox live. We are reaching a point where it is too late to change the system hardware without major reprecussions and having the console ship on time.

They'll compete on software, but hardware is pretty much locked in at this point except for more menial things, like hard drive sizes.